In motor vehicle technology, it is known to operate on an operating characteristic variable of an internal combustion engine and/or of the motor vehicle for control purposes. An electrically actuable element is driven by pulse-shaped signals and the control can be a closed-loop control or an open-loop control.
A system of this kind is disclosed in German patent publication DE-OS 3,621,937 with the system being applied to an electronic engine power control arrangement as an example. In this system, a pulse-shaped drive signal is generated by a computer unit in dependence upon measured values, especially the position of a power positioning element of the engine and a service element actuable by the driver. The signal generated in this manner is for an actuator influencing the power of the engine and at least one parameter of the drive signal is changeable such as the pulse width at fixed drive periods of the drive signal. The system described in this publication carries out a control of the position of the power actuator for controlling engine power. With the realization of a control system of this kind in digital form, the difficulty occurs that the control does not provide the desired characteristics with respect to dynamics, stability and/or precision because, in order to determine the pulse-shaped drive signal, the measured values are used which were detected directly in advance of the drive period of the drive signal or during a previous drive period. Accordingly, the drive signal formed on the basis of these measured values does not consider the changes occurring during the immediate drive period with reference to the control segment and/or its limit conditions.